For this study we used data collected within the framework of the European Science Foundation Project on second language acquistion by immigrants. Data from the core informants, two Moroccan and two Turkish learners of Dutch, were analyzed. In the work on the acquistion of word order published by Klein and Perdue, a functional perspective was taken. In this study the analyses are carried out from a structural perspective: the principles and parameters model. This has several advantages:phenomena below the level of the utterances can be analyzed;lexical and functional categories can play a role in the acquisition process;parallels can be drawn between nominal and verbal phrases;the important role of the source language appears (contradicting the conclusi-ons drawn by Klein and Perdue). An acquisition process in four steps is outlined relating to which part of the syntactic tree is activated and which part not yet. In the third phase functional categories play an important role: they force the L2 learners to model their L2 utterances for a major part on the structure of their L1. This is expressed in creative constructions as the title exhibits. Restructuring occurs mainly in the last stage but this is reached by hardly any of the ESF informants.